Five Stages of Greek Religion Part 9

165). He 'melts with a peculiar joy mingled with tears in remembering the last words' of one who is dead (Fr. 186; cf. 213). He is enthusiastic about an act of kindness performed by another, who walked some five miles to help a barbarian prisoner (Fr. 194).

[106:1] Lucretius, i. 62-79, actually speaks of the great atheist in language taken from the Saviour Religions (see below, p.

162):

When Man's life upon earth in base dismay, Crushed by the burthen of Religion, lay, Whose face, from all the regions of the sky, Hung, glaring hate upon mortality, First one Greek man against her dared to raise His eyes, against her strive through all his days; Him noise of G.o.ds nor lightnings nor the roar Of raging heaven subdued, but p.r.i.c.ked the more His spirit's valiance, till he longed the Gate To burst of this low prison of man's fate.

And thus the living ardour of his mind Conquered, and clove its way; he pa.s.sed behind The world's last flaming wall, and through the whole Of s.p.a.ce uncharted ranged his mind and soul.

Whence, conquering, he returned to make Man see At last what can, what cannot, come to be; By what law to each Thing its power hath been a.s.signed, and what deep boundary set between; Till underfoot is tamed Religion trod, And, by His victory, Man ascends to G.o.d.

[107:1] That is, 8,000 drachmae. Rents had risen violently in 314 and so presumably had land prices. Else one would say the Garden was about the value of a good farm. See Tarn in _The h.e.l.lenistic Age_ (1923), p. 116.

[108:1] t???? ?????d???, Fr. 182.

[108:2] Fr. 143. ?a??? ??a?, f???? ?e??t?????, ???? ???t??????? ???

???p??sa?, ??a????ta? s?? t? ?p?st?????. Fr. 121 (from an enemy) implies that the Hetairae were expected to reform when they entered the Garden.

Cf. Fr. 62 s????s?? ???se ?? ??d?p?te, ??ap?t?? d? e? ? ??a?e: cf.

Fr. 574.

[109:1] See p. 169 below on Diogenes of Oenoanda.

[110:1] Pleasures and pains may be greater or less, but the complete 'removal of pain and fear' is a perfect end, not to be surpa.s.sed. Fr.

408-48, Ep. iii. 129-31.

[110:2] e. g. Plut. _Ne suaviter quidem vivi_, esp. chap. 17 (p. 1098 D).

[111:1] Cf. Fr. 141 when Epicurus writes to Colotes: 'Think of me as immortal, and go your ways as immortal too.'

[112:1] Fr. 601; cf. 598 ff.

[113:1] Fr. 138; cf. 177.

[113:2] '?? t??t??? ??t????f??te? ?? p??? t? a???? t?? t?? pat?a?????

?atad???? ?fest??as??', Fr. 49. Usener, from Philodemus, _De Rhet._ This may be only a playful reference to Plato's phrase about being a pat?a???a? of his father, Parmenides, _Soph._, p. 241 D.

[113:3] Epicurus congratulated himself (erroneously) that he came to Philosophy ?a?a??? p?s?? pa?de?a?, 'undefiled by education'. Cf. Fr. 163 to Pythocles, pa?de?a? d? p?sa?, a????e, fe??e t? ???t??? ???e???, 'From education in every shape, my son, spread sail and fly!'

[113:4] Fr. 343-6.

[116:1] Pythias was the niece, or ward, of Aristotle's friend, Hermias, an extraordinary man who rose from slavery to be first a free man and a philosopher, and later Prince or 'Dynast' of a.s.sos and Atarneus. In the end he was treacherously entrapped by the Persian General, Mentor, and crucified by the king. Aristotle's 'Ode to Virtue' is addressed to him.

To his second wife, Herpyllis, Aristotle was only united by a civil marriage like the Roman _usus_.

[116:2] See note on Dicaearchus at end of chapter.

IV

THE FAILURE OF NERVE

Any one who turns from the great writers of cla.s.sical Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-wors.h.i.+ppers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to G.o.d. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering, and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions; an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve.

Now this ant.i.thesis is often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against this exaggeration; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not a creation of new hearts, the ant.i.thesis is certainly based on fact.

The historical reasons for it are suggested above, in the first of these essays.

My description of this complicated change is, of course, inadequate, but not, I hope, one-sided. I do not depreciate the religions that followed on this movement by describing the movement itself as a 'failure of nerve'. Mankind has not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads to the fuller and deeper knowledge of the world: the patient and sympathetic study of the good citizen who lives in it, or the ecstatic vision of the saint who rejects it. But probably most Christians are inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure, without a contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly attain the religious life. I can imagine an historian of this temper believing that the period we are about to discuss was a necessary softening of human pride, a _Praeparatio Evangelica_.[124:1]

I am concerned in this paper with the lower country lying between two great ranges. The one range is Greek Philosophy, culminating in Plato, Aristotle, the Porch, and the Garden; the other is Christianity, culminating in St. Paul and his successors. The one is the work of h.e.l.las, using some few foreign elements; the second is the work of h.e.l.lenistic culture on a Hebrew stock. The books of Christianity are Greek, the philosophical background is h.e.l.lenistic, the result of the interplay, in the free atmosphere of Greek philosophy, of religious ideas derived from Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. The preaching is carried on in Greek among the Greek-speaking workmen of the great manufacturing and commercial cities. The first preachers are Jews: the central scene is set in Jerusalem. I wish in this essay to indicate how a period of religious history, which seems broken, is really continuous, and to trace the lie of the main valleys which lead from the one range to the other, through a large and imperfectly explored territory.

The territory in question is the so-called h.e.l.lenistic Age, the period during which the Schools of Greece were 'h.e.l.lenizing' the world. It is a time of great enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high importance to history. It is a time full of great names: in one school of philosophy alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius. Yet, curiously enough, it is represented in our tradition by something very like a mere void. There are practically no complete books preserved, only fragments and indirect quotations. Consequently in the search for information about this age we must throw our nets wide.

Beside books and inscriptions of the h.e.l.lenistic period proper I have drawn on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the like for evidence about their teachers and masters. I have used many Christian and Gnostic doc.u.ments and works like the Corpus of Hermetic writings and the Mithras Liturgy.

Among modern writers I must acknowledge a special debt to the researches of Dieterich, c.u.mont, Bousset, Wendland, and Reitzenstein.

The h.e.l.lenistic Age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative Anarchists sometimes long for, a _tabula rasa_, on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life--what Herodotus would call their '_Historie_'. For, as we have seen in the last essay, it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. Now a religious belief that is scientifically preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life before it. Any wors.h.i.+pper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while wors.h.i.+pping. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden.

This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate subst.i.tute in most respects for any mythological G.o.ds. But the Polis too, as we have seen in the last essay, fell with the rise of Macedon. It fell, perhaps, not from any special spiritual fault of its own; it had few faults except its fatal narrowness; but simply because there now existed another social whole, which, whether higher or lower in civilization, was at any rate utterly superior in brute force and in money. Devotion to the Polis lost its reality when the Polis, with all that it represented of rights and laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot, who might, of course, be a hero, but might equally well be a vulgar sot or a corrupt adventurer.

What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the Polis is not our immediate concern. In the realm of thought, on the whole, the Polis triumphed. Aristotle based his social theory on the Polis, not the nation. Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, and we still use his language. Rome herself was a Polis, as well as an Empire. And Professor Haverfield has pointed out that a City has more chance of taking in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges than a Nation has of making men of alien birth its compatriots. A Jew of Tarsus could easily be granted the civic rights of Rome: he could never have been made an Italian or a Frenchman. The Stoic ideal of the World as 'one great City of G.o.ds and Men' has not been surpa.s.sed by any ideal based on the Nation.

What we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from, say, the Peripatetics to the Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history. A soil once teeming with wild weeds was to all appearance swept bare and made ready for new sowing: skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of herbs and plants and tended the garden sedulously. But the bounds of the garden kept spreading all the while into strange untended ground, and even within the original walls the weeding had been hasty and incomplete. At the end of a few generations all was a wilderness of weeds again, weeds rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful, with a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming here and there in the tangle of them. Does that comparison seem disrespectful to religion?

Is philosophy all flowers and traditional belief all weeds? Well, think what a weed is. It is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation which the earth sends up of herself, which lives and will live without the conscious labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive with difficulty; the weeds are what conquer us.

It has been well observed by Zeller that the great weakness of all ancient thought, not excepting Socratic thought, was that instead of appealing to objective experiment it appealed to some subjective sense of fitness. There were exceptions, of course: Democritus, Eratosthenes, Hippocrates, and to a great extent Aristotle. But in general there was a strong tendency to follow Plato in supposing that people could really solve questions by an appeal to their inner consciousness. One result of this, no doubt, was a tendency to lay too much stress on mere agreement.

It is obvious, when one thinks about it, that quite often a large number of people who know nothing about a subject will all agree and all be wrong. Yet we find the most radical of ancient philosophers unconsciously dominated by the argument _ex consensu gentium_. It is hard to find two more uncompromising thinkers than Zeno and Epicurus.

Yet both of them, when they are almost free from the popular superst.i.tions, when they have constructed complete systems which, if not absolutely logic-proof, are calculated at least to keep out the weather for a century or so, open curious side-doors at the last moment and let in all the G.o.ds of mythology.[129:1] True, they are admitted as suspicious characters, and under promise of good behaviour. Epicurus explains that they do not and cannot do anything whatever to anybody; Zeno explains that they are not anthropomorphic, and are only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all-ruling Unity; both parties get rid of the myths. But the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous principle. The general consensus of humanity, they say, shows that there are G.o.ds, and G.o.ds which in mind, if not also in visual appearance, resemble man. Epicurus succeeded in barring the door, and admitted nothing more. But the Stoics presently found themselves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic school, of more dangerous elements still.

I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most radical schools. On the whole both of them fought steadily and strongly against the growth of superst.i.tion, or, if you like to put it in other language, against the dumb demands of man's infra-rational nature. The glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary n.o.bleness; the glory of the Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, never to have yielded one inch of ground to the common foe.

The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superst.i.tions. There is an infinite supply of other superst.i.tions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things--that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.

Let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal G.o.ds, possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being influenced by normal human motives. In general, they helped the good and punished the bad, though doubtless they tended too much to regard as good those who paid them proper attention and as bad those who did not.

Speaking broadly, what was left when this conception proved inadequate?

If it was not these personal G.o.ds who made things happen, what was it?

If the Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down by the G.o.ds so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people, while letting the good escape, what was the explanation of its falling? The answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You can either say: 'It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense: 'It fell because of a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. It was bound to fall.'

There is no real difference in these statements, at least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them. Both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific view of the world. But in the h.e.l.lenistic Age, when Greek thought was spreading rapidly and superficially over vast semi-barbarous populations whose minds were not ripe for it, both views turned back instinctively into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians. It was not, of course, Zeus or Apollo who willed this; every one knew so much: it happened by Chance. That is, Chance or Fortune willed it. And ???? became a G.o.ddess like the rest. The great catastrophes, the great transformations of the mediterranean world which marked the h.e.l.lenistic period, had a strong influence here. If Alexander and his generals had practised some severely orthodox Macedonian religion, it would have been easy to see that the G.o.ds of Macedon were the real rulers of the world. But they most markedly did not. They accepted hospitably all the religions that crossed their path.

Some power or other was disturbing the world, that was clear. It was not exactly the work of man, because sometimes the good were exalted, sometimes the bad; there was no consistent purpose in the story. It was just Fortune. Happy is the man who knows how to placate Fortune and make her smile upon him!

It is worth remembering that the best seed-ground for superst.i.tion is a society in which the fortunes of men seem to bear practically no relation to their merits and efforts. A stable and well-governed society does tend, speaking roughly, to ensure that the Virtuous and Industrious Apprentice shall succeed in life, while the Wicked and Idle Apprentice fails. And in such a society people tend to lay stress on the reasonable or visible chains of causation. But in a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which is habitually the seat of a war between alien armies, the ordinary virtues of diligence, honesty, and kindliness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape destruction is to win the favour of the prevailing powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter the despot, placate the Fate or Fortune or angry G.o.d that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence. The h.e.l.lenistic period pretty certainly falls in some degree under all of these categories. And one result is the sudden and enormous spread of the wors.h.i.+p of Fortune. Of course, there was always a protest. There is the famous

_Nullum numen habes si sit prudentia: nos te, Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam_,

taken by Juvenal from the Greek. There are many unguarded phrases and at least three corrections in Polybius.[133:1] Most interesting of all perhaps, there is the first oration of Plutarch on the Fortune of Alexander.[133:2] A sentence in Pliny's _Natural History_, ii. 22, seems to go back to h.e.l.lenistic sources: